Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation
The Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for Human Progress is an independent foundation under Swiss law. It was established in 1982.

Its statutory purpose is to finance, through donations or loans, research and initiatives that contribute in a significant and innovative way to the progress of humankind through science and social development.

The Foundation is run by a co-opted Foundation Council of 7 to 11 people and has a permanent team of around 15 people to implement its initiatives. Its work is financed by the income from the estate, which provides it with a steady budget of CHF11 million per year.

The Foundation defines itself as a human adventure developed over the long term with public and private partners on the various continents. A review of its 25-year history illustrates the Foundation’s ethos.

Its current priorities, defined in its 2004–2010 guidelines and its 2006–2007 strategy, are:
- to support the emergence of a world community, made indispensable by globalisation;

- to contribute to three major changes that humankind must make in the course of the 21st century:

• a revolution in governance in order to manage the new interdependence between human beings, between societies, and between humanity and the biosphere;
• the search for a universal ethic of responsibility;
• the creation of a sustainable society.

more information

Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World

The alliance was founded in 1994 and receives a significant amount of funding from the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation. It is an informal network made of people, institutions and movements that are aware of the complexity of contemporary problems and seek to find the necessary mutations so that they can together act upon the future. This network has generated a social dynamics and is inventing new forms of collective action.

The Alliance has its roots in the changes in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was formed in reaction to the uncontested dominant system of free-market globalization and the concurrent emergence of a new civil society on a global scale, which has marked its distance with the old ideological models and obsolete methods of social and political organization. It is a searching for new paradigms, new relations, enhancing the value of cross-culturality, of diversity, of the claim for new human rights, etc. It has appeared as a response to the need felt by a growing number of people for an articulation of the forces of thinking and action.
more information